Chapter and Verse:
A Skeptic Revisits Christianity

by Mike Bryan

Phillip E. Johnson

Published in First Things, December,
1991

Mike Bryan is an atheist, raised a Methodist, who wanted to
write a book about "Christians who actually believe the Bible
versus all the other kinds." So he attended Criswell College
in Dallas, an institution dedicated to producing crusaders for
the cause of Biblical Inerrancy.

Mike (his writing establishes a first-name acquaintance) has
provided an absorbing account of what he found there and how it
affected him. The book particularly attracted my attention because
so many professors in the secular universities are talking about
the pressure to be "politically correct" on subjects
like feminism and affirmative action. How does the situation compare
in a fundamentalist college that is dedicated by definition to
furthering a dogma?

It compares very favorably, according to Mike Bryan. In the
secular universities things are up for grabs, with the result
that everyone is engaged in a power struggle. At Criswell the
basic premise is settled: professors and students alike wouldn't
be there if they didn't accept it. As a result, professors feel
free to expand their students' intellectual horizons by teaching
them to understand competing premises sympathetically. Here is
a typical description of what Mike saw and heard in the classroom:

The theology was fascinating, the classes fun, the students
were real people.... And where was the lockstep indoctrination
I had feared from a Bible college? I sought for it in vain. Everyone
was a conservative Christian, but much of what I heard from [all
the Criswell professors] was assorted challenges to students,
to the point of riling them up. Speaking to captive audiences
that agreed with their own beliefs, the professors constantly
challenged those beliefs by calling attention to opposing views
and requiring students to know them and understand them. "Liberal"
was one of the first words that came to mind as a description
of the atmosphere in Criswell College classes.

The Old Testament course Mike remembered taking at Columbia
was very different. There students were not encouraged
to consider seriously any alternatives to the professor's naturalistic
philosophy, or to the "inerrant" theory that the Pentateuch
was patched together from documents of different centuries.

Sometimes the prayer warriors in the Criswell student body
get a little impatient with the mind-stretching. In the manner
of budding practitioners in a law school who want to learn how
to attract clients and win cases, they ask "Do we really
need all this?" Like a law professor telling students that
they may one day be Supreme Court Justices, President Paige Patterson
replies that Criswell graduates are meant to be generals in the
Lord's army, not privates, and as such they have to understand
the adversary's thinking. Patterson himself is a general on the
conservative side of the Southern Baptist denomination's notorious
internal war, and Mike's portrayal of his easygoing ways will
astonish anyone familiar only with the media stereotype of the
participants in that conflict.

Mike was favorably impressed not only with the intellectual
atmosphere, but with the personal integrity and generosity of
the faculty and students. They were nothing like the television
hucksters that have been such a gift (Godsend?) to the media image-makers.
Near the end of the book, Mike examines his own mixed feelings
after Paige Patterson has genially introduced him at an alumni
banquet as the school's guest atheist. Mike is confident that
Patterson's "unfailing kindness" is not merely the calculated
cordiality that anyone might show to a visitor who is known to
be writing a book about the experience. No, Patterson's "generous
and undoctrinnaire attitude, shared by almost everyone else at
the school," is "another mark of his irrepressible mischievousness
and genuine interest in all folks and their diverse ways -- a
mark of his personality, not his faith."

But why are these personal virtues so pervasive at Criswell
College, if they are not marks of the faith? Mike describes the
atmosphere of "unadorned, joyful piety of the place,"
and quotes Patterson to explain where it comes from:

One of the things that happens to you in conversion is that
there's a fundamental change in your attitude toward people when
the Lord moves into your life. You don't any longer see them
as the girl who sells you the hamburger or the guy who changes
your tires. You see each of them as very precious people, each
of whom has a fascinating personal story. You get to where it's
fun to be with them, see what makes them tick."

If Mike Bryan likes the folks at Criswell so much, why doesn't
he answer the altar call and spread the kind of joy that accompanies
the finding of a lost sheep? The question is starkly presented
because Mike is under no illusions about the nihilistic world
he presently inhabits. His metaphor for that world is the Mark
Rothko Chapel, a shrine of the religious left on the campus of
St. Thomas College in Houston. The chapel is supposed to be like
a big tree that offers shade to everyone, and the lobby table
holds all the sacred texts: the Bible, the Tibetan Book of the
Dead, the Bhagavad Gita, and so on.

Mike sees the chapel as "the perfect embodiment of a godless
world, the array of God-seeking texts on display notwithstanding,
or even proving the point: belief in everything, belief in nothing."
Visitors upon seeing the famous religious paintings look puzzled,
or disappointed, but never joyous. "Where is the hospitable
shade? Where was it for Rothko? The painter committed suicide
before his pictures were hung."

Mike understands that intellectual nihilism reflects an underlying
spiritual despair. "There must be some connection between
the disbelief on the part of most artists today in any kind of
organizing principle for the universe (God), and their refusal
to employ readily grasped organizing principles in their work.
There must also be a connection between artists' disdain for those
'classes' that still believe in God and their delight in confronting
those rubes with offensive images, such as the photograph of a
cross dipped in a jar of urine."

Mike swears that he remains a child of the sixties, with no
leanings to neo-conservative politics. "Nevertheless, we
would all agree that this culture is nearly overwhelmed by all
the bullshit and bad faith, by the literally spellbinding vacuity,
top to bottom, left to right." That much disenchantment with
the culture produced by the death of God invites the big question:
why does someone who knows he's lost in the desert turn away from
an oasis that offers living water?

Criswell students tell Mike that the stumbling block is pride,
and he admits that he is afraid of looking like a fool. "Secularism
is the easy road today. Telling friends with Ph.D's you've become
a born-again Christian takes nerve." The irony is that those
friends are undoubtedly relativists about everything except a
few pet ideas like the death of God. Mike can't help thinking
that these inconsistent relativists must be absolutely right.
Why?

His problem isn't just with the fundamentalists' inerrancy
doctrine, or their regretful insistence that unbelievers go to
hell. Mike has some attractive alternatives. He experiences an
"epiphany of sorts" in a Catholic church in El Salvador,
where the liberationist sculpture reflects an understanding of
human suffering more suited to the spirit of our times than the
Baptist emphasis upon personal sin. Why not join the Catholic
Church, which has many mansions?

Mike also has an important conversation with the pastor of
the Methodist church of his childhood, now retired. Mike is unimpressed
by the kind of vacuous liberal theology that C.S. Lewis called
Christianity-and-water, but Don Pevey's liberalism inspires respect
because it grows out of personal experiences with which Mike can
identify. "I would like to have spent hours with this man
whose Christianity doesn't claim to be definitive, much less exclusive,
who simply finds in the faith and communicates very effectively
to anyone who cares to hear one deep and beautiful mystery: God
incarnate determined to save his children from themselves."
Why not become that kind of Methodist?

The answer has to be that the deep and beautiful mystery is,
regrettably, a fairy tale. Mike explains the ultimate stumbling
block early in the book, in his discussion of liberal theology's
campaign to "demythologize" Christianity. The attempt
had to be made because we live in a technological age where "Science,
not Scripture is now inerrant." For a time reason and revelation
lived comfortably together in the two-level system of Aquinas,
but a crisis arose when reason (Galileo, Hume, Darwin) began to
cast doubt on what Scripture had revealed. As Mike sums up the
situation:

The advances in scientific knowledge of the past four centuries
have undercut the textual integrity of the Scriptures as a whole,
but perhaps more damaging is the nature of the scientific enterprise
itself, which postulates anti-supernaturalism as a necessary
first principle for its endeavors. Thus the initially peaceful
coexistence of reason and faith has become, in the secular mind,
an irreconcilable contradiction. Faith is now opposed to reason
-- opinion, to put the best light on it, or ignorance, to put
the worst. The Reformation thinkers had said all along that splitting
reason from revelation would be fatal because it would give man
an independent role and thus separate him from an objective,
inerrant source for knowledge -- Holy Scripture. They were correct.

But modern man substituted science as another source of inerrant
knowledge, and Mike cannot shake off the influence of that choice.
He is impressed by C.S. Lewis's argument that, although the Christian
theistic point of view can comprehend science, art, and morality,
"the scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these
things, not even science itself." (That is because to reductionist
science our minds are merely machines selected for their efficiency
in producing offspring.) Mike followed a similar line of reasoning
but with different premises. "While Lewis and [Francis] Schaeffer
presupposed our sense of meaning and purpose, I presupposed the
workings of evolution and the natural world, and I decided that
I must therefore be a machine because nothing but a machine could
evolve from a machinelike, purposeless process."

There are liberal theologians who embrace scientific naturalism
but still think of themselves as Christians: in fact, they dominate
the mainline seminaries. Mike recognizes that these accomodationists
have discarded the only metaphysical basis that can support a
mystery of God incarnate determined to save his children from
themselves, and so their Christianity survives only as a metaphor.
That is why the Christians he respects are the genuine, unapologetic
supernaturalists, but he thinks that option is foreclosed to one
who has drunk deeply of the water of naturalism, death-giving
though he may know it to be.

Chapter and Verse is generous in spirit but tough in
mind, and the people it describes are a joy to meet. I hope Mike
Bryan will visit another important subculture and write a book
about the experience. This time I wish he would forego religion
and inhabit the world of the scientists. Take a good look at evolutionary
biology, Mike, or the dogmatically reductionist world of the biochemists
who hope to redesign humanity after they crack the human genome
code. Compare the practitioners of inerrant science with what
you saw at Criswell College. Do they understand, as the Criswell
faculty does, that all thinking rests upon presuppositions, which
by definition are not derived from logical argument or evidence?
Do the biologists know the difference between what they presuppose
and what they demonstrate, and are they even interested in finding
out?

As Socrates used to say, you can't be too careful when it come
to scrutinizing the teachers into whose care you are committing
your soul. Look into it, Mike. Then write another book, and put
me down for one of the first copies.